A little while ago we published an update on investigating incidents called "Learning the Lessons". That focussed on the importance of effective investigations and how organisations need to actually understand what happens in incidents, before developing interventions which address the true root causes.
Today the RAC Foundation have published a piece of work we undertook for them this year as part of their Road Collision Investigation Project being conducted with Highways England and the UK Department for Transport.
This report, an International Review of Road Collision Investigation Approaches looks at the models adopted around the world for the investigation of incidents from the perspective of learning lessons for the benefit of society, from research-based programmes through thematic investigations to major incident focussed investigations.
The foreword to the report by RAC Foundation Director Steve Gooding summarises the situation well: "...this report suggests that countries as geographically distant as Finland and New Zealand, and as different in scale as the USA and Malta, all see some merit in applying the same sort of dispassionate analytical rigour to road crashes as is routinely and historically the case in other areas of transport such as maritime, aviation and rail.
That still doesn’t mean that what is happening overseas is immediately translatable to this country. We haven’t found a simple blueprint we could copy. But it does suggest we are absolutely on the right lines to be exploring how best we could do more to learn more and so sharpen our strategies for making our roads safer for all."
We hope that you'll read the report and we hope that some real change might result from it - and we hope it will spark discussion too. Do get in touch and let us know what you think.